Skip to main content

Home/ Chandler School/ Group items tagged learning

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Jill Bergeron

The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views

www.marshallmemo.com/issue.php

bias decision making evaluation teacher evaluation differentiation self-efficacy independence cold calling classroom management exit ticket formative assessment

shared by Jill Bergeron on 13 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • professionals often make decisions that deviate significantly from those of their peers, from their own prior decisions, and from rules that they themselves claim to follow… Where there is judgment, there is noise – and usually more of it than you think.”
  • In a school, if a principal consistently gives harsher punishments to boys than girls for the same infractions, that is bias, but if she often gives harsher punishments to students just before lunchtime, that’s noise.]
  • A noise audit works best when respected team members create a scenario that is realistic, the people involved buy into the process, and everyone is willing to accept unpleasant results and act on them.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The challenge, say the authors, is designing classroom observations that provide valid data on what’s happening day to day in classrooms, make meaningful distinctions among teachers, provide teachers with useful feedback, and support helpful, high-quality professional development.
  • To accomplish these important goals, several challenges need to be addressed: -   Quality assurance of supervisors’ observation and coaching skills; -   Achieving a reasonable degree of inter-rater reliability among supervisors; -   A rubric with research-based criteria for classroom instruction; -   The conceptual difficulty of capturing complex classroom dynamics in a rating instrument; -   Getting an accurate sampling of each teacher’s work; -   Giving fair evaluations to teachers working with different types of students
  • Addressing the tendency of principals to “go easy” on some teachers to keep the peace and/or avoid the hard work of following up on critical evaluations (are outside observers and/or multiple observers necessary to get truly objective data on teachers?).
  • I would suggest two more questions: First, are classroom visits announced or unannounced? If researchers don’t gather data on this, they are missing an important variable in the reliability of teacher assessment – teachers are likely to put on an especially good lesson when they know they’re being observed. Second, are teacher-evaluation rubrics used to score individual classroom visits, which is conceptually very difficult, or as end-of-year summations of multiple classroom visits with feedback conversations through the year?
  • Tomlinson and other proponents suggest that teachers differentiate by content (what is taught), process (how it’s taught), and product (how students are asked to demonstrate their learning).
  • students learn better, they said, when the work is at the right level of difficulty, personally relevant, and appropriately engaging.
  • trying to assess a teacher’s work asking, Is it differentiated? runs the risk of missing the forest for the trees. Better, says Marshall, to ask two broader questions (tip of the hat to Rick DuFour): -   What are students supposed to be learning? -   Are all students mastering it?
  • Good lesson plans build in multiple entry points, using the principles of Universal Design for Learning to make learning accessible to as many students as possible, and have clear goals; thoughtful task analysis; chunked learning; teaching methods appropriate to the content; links to students’ interests and experiences; checks for understanding; and accommodations for students with special needs.
  • a major factor in student success is a set of in-the-moment moves that effective teachers have always used, among them effective classroom management; knowing students well; being culturally sensitive; making the subject matter exciting; making it relevant; making it clear; taking advantage of visuals and props; involving students and getting them involved with each other; having a sense of humor; and nimbly using teachable moments.” But equally important is checking for understanding – dry-erase boards, clickers, probing questions, looking over students’ shoulders – and using students’ responses to continuously fine-tune teaching.
  • Timely follow-up with these students is crucial – pullout, small-group after-school help, tutoring, Saturday school, and other venues to help them catch up.
  • Among the most important life skills that students should take away from their K-12 years,” says Marshall, “is the ability to self-assess, know their strengths and weaknesses, deal with difficulty and failure, and build a growth mindset. Student self-efficacy and independence should be prime considerations in planning, lesson execution, and follow-up so that students move through the grades becoming increasingly motivated, confident, and autonomous learners prepared to succeed in the wider world.”
  • cold-calling actually increases students’ voluntary participation. “Cold-calling encourages students to prepare more and to participate more frequently,” said one researcher. “The more they prepare, and the more frequently they participate, the more comfortable they become when participating.”
  • If we don’t encourage students to come out of their shells for fear of putting them on the spot, we may be doing them a disservice… You’re curious about their views and their understanding of the issues being discussed. What they think is important – both to their own learning and to that of their peers.”
  • Drawing on two decades of data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, the authors found that between 1998 and 2010, the reading readiness gap closed by 16 percent and the math gap by 10 percent. The black-white and the Hispanic-white gaps also narrowed by about 15 percent.
  • the gaps closed because of rapid progress by low-income children, not declines in the readiness of high-income children, and the gains persisted at least through fourth grade.
  • What brought about the early reading and math gains? The authors believe several factors contributed: • The availability of high-quality, publicly funded preschool programs – the percent of U.S. 4-year-olds enrolled in state-funded preschools has increased from 14 to 29 percent from 2000. • The fact that more families are investing in books and other reading matter for children, as well as Internet access and computer games focused on reading and math skills. • More parents are spending quality time with children, taking them to local libraries, and engaging in learning activities at home.
  • Jill Bergeron on 13 Sep 16
     
    "In This Issue: 1. "Noise" in decision-making 2. Are classroom observations accurate measures of teachers' work? 3. A different way of thinking about differentiation 4. A professor changes his mind about cold-calling 5. Close reading of challenging texts in middle school 6. Good news about the rich-poor gap in kindergarten entry skills 7. On-the-spot assessment tools 8. Short items: The Kappan poll"
Jill Bergeron

The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 2 views

www.marshallmemo.com/issue.php

PBL differentiation effective teams tech integration teacher retention science learning gap' meetings teacher mentorship mentors

shared by Jill Bergeron on 10 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • 1. What makes a team effective? 2. A new perspective on closing the achievement gap 3. Project-based learning 101 4. A school network experiments with high tech and student choice 5. Opening up a daily 40-minute block in a North Carolina high school 6. How to hold onto high-quality new teachers 7. The effect of reading about the struggles of accomplished scientists
  • Project Aristotle, as it was dubbed, found that some team characteristics that seemed intuitively important – members sharing interests and hobbies, having similar educational backgrounds, socializing after hours – didn’t correlate with team success.
  • The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.”
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • Then Project Aristotle began looking at group norms – the culture of unwritten rules that guide people when they collaborate – and hit pay dirt. It turned out that two group norms were shared by virtually all of Google’s most effective teams: -   Equal air time – In teams that got the best results, members participated roughly the same amount during meetings. “As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,” said Google researcher Anita Woolley. “But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.” -   Interpersonal sensitivity – Effective team members had the ability to intuit how colleagues felt by their tone of voice, facial expressions, and other nonverbal cues. The members of less-effective teams were less tuned in to their teammates’ feelings.
  • The behaviors that create psychological safety – conversational turn-taking and empathy – are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else. In fact, they sometimes matter more.”
  • In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.”
  • He believes there are two “ubiquitous features of conventional school environments” that trigger and reinforce the psychological factors noted above, augment the disadvantages with which minority students enter school, and feed the peer pressures to disengage from schooling – all of which creates a self-reinforcing downward spiral of achievement. The two features are: -   Students being given work that is too difficult for their current academic level; -   Students getting low grades on their work rather than frequent, individualized, objective feedback.
  • “The hypothesis,” say Yeh, “is that the conventional school system is inadvertently structured in a way that fosters disengagement, thereby reducing effort, which depresses achievement and grades, causing demoralization, which further reduces engagement and achievement.” The process kicks in around third grade, when struggling students begin to view themselves as intellectually inferior because their grades are lower than their classmates’, contributing to decreased self-efficacy and increasing passivity; it accelerates in middle school, at which point low grades strongly correlate with eventually dropping out.
  • What is to be done? Yeh’s theory is that by flipping the two pernicious factors, schools can turn the downward spiral into a virtuous upward cycle of achievement. That involves: -   Adjusting task difficulty for low-performing students to an appropriate level of challenge so that if they apply effective effort, they will be successful. -   Rapid performance feedback with respect to a standard, not other students.
  • He cites positive research on two programs using this approach – Reading Assessment and Math Assessment – and reports on a systematic study comparing different interventions aimed at closing the achievement gap – charter schools, voucher programs, an additional year of school, various high-quality pre-school programs, full-day kindergarten, class size reduction, value-added assessment, summer school, teacher salary incentives, teacher experience, teacher PD, longer school day, computer instruction, tutoring, and school reform. Rapid assessment is dramatically more successful at raising student achievement than any of the others.
  • by far the most powerful and cost-effective intervention is to adjust task difficulty and provide students with prompt, objective feedback on their efforts.
  • “When students engage in project-based learning over the course of their time in school,” says John Larmer (Buck Institute for Education) in this article in Educational Leadership, “there’s an accumulating effect. They feel empowered. They see that they can make a difference.” In addition, they’re more likely to acquire the skills, knowledge, and dispositions needed for college and career success.
  • the key elements of project-based learning, carefully planned and skillfully managed by the teacher:
  • A challenging problem or question
  • Sustained inquiry
  • Authenticity
  • Student voice and choice
  • Reflection
  • Critique and revision
  • Public product
  • four ways that project-based learning can go off the rails and not fulfill its potential: -   Mistake #1: Using materials that aren’t truly project-based; beware of PBL-lite! -   Mistake #2: Providing inadequate training and support for teachers; one-shot workshops are not enough. -   Mistake #3: Over-using projects in the curriculum; basic skills can still be taught in a more conventional format. -   Mistake #4: Implementing project-based learning on an ad hoc basis; to get the long-term effect, students need to engage in high-quality projects on a regular basis through their school years.
  • AltSchools encourage students to dive into topics they’re passionate about, with teachers tracking everything they do using classroom video cameras and elaborate K-8 databases. The schools make a point of shaping diverse student bodies by giving scholarships to students whose parents can’t afford the $30,000-a-year tuition.
  • We are raising a generation that will have the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips, for every minute of their life, so clearly education needs to change to accommodate that.”
  • “Basically, what we have told teachers is we have hired you for your creative teacher brains, and anytime you are doing something that doesn’t require your creative teacher brain that a computer could be doing as well as or better than you, then a computer should do it.”
  • To a computer measuring keystrokes, a student zoning out because he’s bored is indistinguishable from one who is moved by her book to imagine a world of her own.”
  • “People are very focused on the algorithm. But equally important is the quality of the materials” – the clarity of the math questions and the worthiness of the readings being presented on students’ computer screens. Willingham also notes that teachers in high-tech classrooms often have to prepare two lesson plans – one that uses the technology and one for when the technology breaks down.
  • Hire capable, well-matched teachers. Detailed advertisements and postings are important to giving candidates a clear idea of each position, says Clement. She also recommends longer interviews with more candidates, enlisting experienced teachers to take part in interviews, and gathering information on candidates from multiple sources.
  • Provide continuous professional development. This should include induction that eases new teachers into the demands of the full job – orientation before classes begin, well-matched mentors through the first five years, and ongoing PD specific to rookies’ needs.
  • Use colleagues to provide feedback. Traditional “gotcha” teacher evaluation has rarely been helpful in supporting new teachers, says Clement. Trained mentors can provide non-evaluative feedback that really makes a difference, perhaps with a firewall between their observations and the formal evaluation process. Of course it’s important that incoming teachers know the district’s criteria for effective teaching and are familiar with how administrators will assess their work.
  • Understand millennials. “This generation of teachers wants to network and have input,” says Clement. Most have a strong preference for electronic interaction, and administrators and colleagues should meet young teachers where they are tech-wise and provide strong online resources.
  • • Provide leadership opportunities. “While many new teachers are just surviving, others actively seek an avenue to truly make a difference,” says Clement. To find fulfillment in teaching and stay in the profession, they need to get involved in meaningful roles outside their classrooms. Some possibilities: speaking at induction ceremonies and serving on a welcome committee for the newest hires; leading book study groups; taking part in social service organizations on campus; and serving on curriculum committees
  • students who read about scientists’ struggles, whether intellectual or personal, got better grades in science after reading the texts. The positive effect was most pronounced among students whose science grades were low before the experiment.
  • Another finding: both before and after reading the texts, students who had a “growth” mindset (effort, not innate talent, determines success) tended to do better in science classes than students with a “fixed” mindset.
  • Jill Bergeron on 10 Mar 16
     
    This week's articles cover PBL, differentiation, effective teams, tech integration, teacher retention and science teaching and learning.
Jill Bergeron

Student-Centered Learning: March 2016 | Matt Renwick - 0 views

mattrenwick.com/...what-im-reading-march-2016

student-centered learning

shared by Jill Bergeron on 25 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Kraft and his team found four attributes identified in schools that experienced consistently high achievement: School safety and order Leadership and professional development High academic expectations Teacher relationships and collaboration
  • Specific professional learning offerings for teachers include one-to-one instructional coaching and school leadership opportunities. Teacher retention and higher test scores have been the result of these efforts.
  • Educators can start reimagining instruction by asking ourselves what learning we experienced in our school careers that truly mattered in our lives. This reflection can lead to finding topics and themes from our current curriculum and assessing how well they fit within this mindset of lifeworthy learning. Four tenets of big understandings – opportunity, insight, action, and ethics – can serve as gatekeepers in this process.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Perkins closes this piece of identifying three national agendas (achievement, information, expertise) that may have had too much importance placed upon them.
  • Play-based learning should allow for the students to explore their passions and interests without an outcome necessarily in mind. “Play is not something you do to a child. If you have an agenda, if you are requiring them to do it, if you have to make it ‘fun’ to get them to comply, if they are not free to stop at any time, then it is not play.”
  • Play is self-chosen, enjoyable, inherently valuable, and unstructured.
  • Jill Bergeron on 25 Apr 16
     
    This is my title I created for this post. Mr. Renwick sums up several books and posts related to the idea of creating conditions for student-centered learning.
Jill Bergeron

Resources for Service-Learning: Service-Learning: Programs: Center for Innovative Teach... - 0 views

citl.indiana.edu/...resources-service-learning

service learning community service

shared by Jill Bergeron on 14 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Jill Bergeron on 14 Feb 17
     
    This resource contains mainly forms related to service learning.
Jill Bergeron

Teaching Empathy: Turning a Lesson Plan into a Life Skill | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...son-plan-life-skill-joe-hirsch

empathy edutopia SEL social emotional learning

shared by Jill Bergeron on 12 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • academic rigor, with its unflinching emphasis on measurable success, seems strangely at odds with emotional intelligence, a soufflé of moods and feelings.
  • Designed around cooperative learning, your lesson plan can actively foster class-wide feelings of cohesiveness, collaboration and interdependence -- without sacrificing instructional time or learning goals.
  • In cooperative learning, students work together, think together and plan together using a variety of group structures designed along an instructional path.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Cooperative learning creates what Daniel Goleman calls "cognitive empathy," a mind-to-mind sense of how another person's thinking works.
  • The better we understand others, the better we know them -- pointing toward (among other virtues) greater trust, appreciation and generosity.
  • Dispatching students into "groups" with the hopes they'll become more empathetic carries the same potential for success as trying to hit a dartboard while blindfolded
  • o harness the power of cooperative learning as a tool for building empathy, teachers need a specific strategy, a best practice that works
  • Created in 1971 by psychologist Elliot Aronson (1) to defuse his volatile fifth grade classroom, the jigsaw method (2) has a long track record of successfully reducing classroom conflict and increasing positive educational outcomes. As an empathy builder, it also opens doors of opportunity.
    • Jill Bergeron
      Jill Bergeron on 12 Feb 14
       
      How jigsaw groups work
  • The fluid movement, flexible groupings and redistribution of responsibility force kids to be more actively engaged in what and how they learn.
  • jigsaw learning flows freely between group members. Familiar roles change, too.
  • Teachers re-outfit themselves as sideline reporters, monitoring, questioning and analyzing the action, while the quickest and slowest students suddenly discover themselves in supporting and leading roles they never quite imagined.
  • Creating points of contact between students who would otherwise not interact delivers a humbling but elevating awareness of the "other."
  • the hard currency is active listening, or the art of thinking about what the other person is saying.
  • And because each student has a purpose (a teaching role) and something valuable (new and necessary information), every learner is regarded as an asset, not a liability
Jill Bergeron

Modern Professional Learning: Connecting PLCs With PLNs | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...l-learning-plc-pln-vicki-davis

pln plc pd professional development edutopia

shared by Jill Bergeron on 30 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • a Professional Learning Community is "a group of educators that meets regularly, shares expertise, and works collaboratively to improve teaching skills and the academic performance of students."
  • A PLC is made up of "a school's professional staff members who continuously seek to find answers through inquiry and act on their learning to improve student learning.
  • Teachers who work in more supportive environments become more effective at raising student achievement on standardized tests over time than do teachers who work in less supportive environments.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • a PLC is typically: Face to face High accountability Comprised of colleagues from a face-to-face or daily environment Comprised of peers with similar professional responsibilities
  • Torrey Trust defines the PLN (PDF) as "a system of interpersonal connections and resources that support informal learning.
  • according to multiple, peer reviewed studies, simply being in an open network instead of a closed one is the best predictor of career success . . . the further . . . you go towards a closed network, the more you repeatedly hear the same ideas, which reaffirm what you already believe. The further you go towards an open network, the more you're exposed to new ideas
  • PLNs are typically: Online and open More informal Open to a free flow of ideas Often welcoming to newcomers
  • PLNs' weaknesses are: Teachers get excited about an idea but meet resistance in their local school. Teachers have no way to share and discuss ideas with their local school. Some educators use their PLN inconsistently and have no accountability to keep learning. PLNs can be overwhelming because it seems like too much, or users can't focus. Authentic conversations can become dominated by a few loud voices. Some hashtag founders exhibit territorial behavior that limits conversation. Trolls and spammers can derail hashtag conversations.
  • "Blend" your school's PLC by creating an online space for it. Make this a simple place to share resources and ideas gleaned from participants' PLNs. Many teachers don't collaborate online because it's just one more thing to do. Make it simple to share. Give the less social-media-savvy educators simple options such as an email subscription to a few blogs.
  • Encourage educators to share ideas. Set specific goals. You can't be everywhere and do everything. Focus can achieve incredible results if you're all searching your PLNs for new ideas to tackle a troubling issue in your PLC
  • 5. Link the online and face-to-face worlds. Administrators and others should mention the online spaces in staff meetings. Likewise, an online reflection of something said at the PLC helps show continuity. Educators should see both the online and face-to-face spaces as substantial parts of their PLC.
  • Jill Bergeron on 30 Nov 15
     
    This article gives the benefits and weaknesses of PLNs and PLCs.
Jill Bergeron

How Listening and Sharing Help Shape Collaborative Learning Experiences | MindShift | K... - 0 views

ww2.kqed.org/...aborative-learning-experiences

collaboration Listening Learning Reflection sharing joint attention small group work group work

shared by Jill Bergeron on 13 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • In school, getting people to share can be difficult. Learners may be diffident, or they may not have good strategies for sharing. Children often do not know how to offer constructive criticism or build on an idea. It can be helpful to give templates for sharing, such as two likes and a wish, where the “wish” is a constructive criticism or a building idea.
    • Jill Bergeron
      Jill Bergeron on 13 Sep 16
       
      Template for young children to follow when giving feedback.
  • listening and sharing as cooperative techniques can alleviate frustration and, more importantly, allow group learning to surpass what would be possible by a single student (Slavin, 1995).
  • when students collaborate on class assignments, they learn the material better (we provide examples below). Ideally, small group work can yield both better abilities to cooperate and better learning of the content.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Visual attention provides an index of what people are thinking about.
Scott Nancarrow

Activity for kids outside of school time is an oasis in a 'learning desert' - NewsWorks - 0 views

www.newsworks.org/...-an-oasis-in-a-learning-desert

differentiation STEAM maker pbl

shared by Scott Nancarrow on 18 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Urban Thinkscape, is designed to re-imagine the Promise Zone by increasing caregiver-child engagement through playful learning activities installed in public spaces.
  • bring children's museum-quality learning activities right into the streets where people wait for the bus or hang out after school.
  • prioritize raising "happy, healthy, thinking, caring, and social children who become collaborative, creative, competent, and responsible citizens tomorrow." Only from our own determination will our children learn perseverance; only from our innovation will our children learn creativity; and only through our prioritizing education — inside the school walls and out — will our children learn to do so as well.
  • Scott Nancarrow on 18 Feb 17
     
    Transform "trapped spaces" into opportunities for brain activity - possible STEAM and/or PBL activities? WAIT... EVEN BETTER: SCHOOL GROUPS EACH DESIGN, PROTOTYPE, INSTALLATION ... gotta remember to talk about this one more...
Jill Bergeron

PBL Teachers Need Time to Reflect, Too | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...-teacher-reflection-suzie-boss

PBL reflection edutopia steam STEM new teacher PD

shared by Jill Bergeron on 15 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • "We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience."
  • Reflection not only makes learning stick at the end of a project but also helps students think about what's working well and what's not during PBL.
  • The same holds true for teachers.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Perhaps you're scrambling to coordinate project showcase events before the holiday break. But it's well worth your time, while your memory's fresh, to make some notes and gather information about how things went this time around.
  • Don't rely on your own impressions. Ask students to share their insights about the strengths and weaknesses of a project.
  • By inviting student feedback, you demonstrate respect for their opinions and underscore the value of student voice.
  • Be sure to ask open-ended questions
  • Some PBL teachers make reflection a habit by blogging about projects as they unfold. In the process, they create an archive of observations that they can refer back to later.
  • While individual teacher reflection is valuable, reflecting with colleagues can be even better.
  • Think of yourselves as doctors on rounds, suggests the Coalition of Essential Schools (11), as you look closely for evidence of student learning.
  • In "Wild About Cramlington," (12) teacher Darren Mead describes the challenge of giving his students an experience with "just enough failure to act and think in a way different from the normal school day."
  • Jill Bergeron on 15 Jan 14
     
    Helpful article for considering how teachers can learn from their own lessons. The samples from current teacher blogs are very impactful.
Jill Bergeron

What Keeps Students Motivated to Learn? | MindShift - 0 views

blogs.kqed.org/...udents-them-motivated-to-learn

motivation PBL engagement

shared by Jill Bergeron on 17 Mar 14 - No Cached
    • Jill Bergeron
      Jill Bergeron on 17 Mar 14
       
      Comments on what it takes to collaborate in MS.
  • “What really helped me was the teachers and staff here who showed me that they cared about me. Students can feel that.” She described hating math for most of her life until a good teacher described what she could do with strong math skills in the future. “It got me motivated to learn more and I showed my potential as a student, which I never knew I had,” she said.
  • Every student on the panel had a story of big failure on an important class project. But because the culture of their schools encourage them to learn from mistakes, they can clearly articulate what they’d do differently next time and even laugh about it.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Students get used to giving and taking critique daily with each other and hearing it from educators as well. Their ease with it comes from practice and with the awareness that feedback isn’t the end of the process, it’s a part of improving their work.
  • When evaluating student work, frame feedback in terms of the learner’s goals instead of referring to the standards. “Goals are more motivating for students to hear,”
  • Students want projects to be integrated across subjects, not separated by discipline.
  • High Tech Middle Chula Vista seventh grader Ana de Almeida Amaral described an integrated humanities and math/science project, when students read Sherlock Holmes, wrote their own versions, and became experts in one aspect of forensics.
  • Together they created a crime scene in their classroom and then taught everyone assembled about a part of the forensics process through a stop animation video.
  • “I love when projects are integrated so you can find so many different aspects,”
  • “If teachers give broad guidelines for the project and then have students do something they’re interested in it will bring students along the whole time,” said Gramann. “Treat students like adults. If the students feel like they’re worth it they’ll act more like adults.”
  • Authentic choice is one aspect of allowing that to happen. Students on the panel described real choices they make about their education on a daily basis, from which book they’ll read in Humanities to the different topics they want to research.
  • “Teachers tend to give projects and benchmarks and create topics around things that students don’t really connect to.” He was adamant that learning how to connect a topic to oneself is the key to learning. “Throughout middle school you have to develop skills of how things connect to yourself,” he said.
  • “Collaborating productively is a leadership skill at this school,” said Dora Aguilar, a junior at City Arts and Tech, part of the Envision network. She says that while it can be hard, it can also be very rewarding because working with other people allows her to see the project through the eyes of her peers.
  • Other students talked about difficult collaborations too, emphasizing that it runs more smoothly if one group member agrees to keep everyone on track.
Jill Bergeron

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | Wired Busine... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...all

technology education learning teaching pedagogy sugata_mitra StudentCentered

shared by Jill Bergeron on 21 Oct 13 - No Cached
    • Jill Bergeron
      Jill Bergeron on 21 Oct 13
       
      Mitra's experiment- what will kids do with a computer?
  • “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.”
  • “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity.
  • The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.
  • A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem.
Kimberly Marlow

Micro-Credentials: Empowering Lifelong Learners | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...felong-learners-krista-moroder

badges professional development catie digital badges

shared by Kimberly Marlow on 17 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Within our own profession, teachers are engaging in continued learning through personal learning networks, websites like Edutopia and MOOCs. Anyone has the ability to self-construct curriculum and gain the skills once exclusive to those able to pay for a traditional education.
  • Despite the vast shift in how we pursue knowledge, little has changed with how we credential those who acquire knowledge. We still primarily credential learners based on seat time and credit hours, and often only recognize learning pursued through traditional pathways.
  • For teachers, badges could be a way to demonstrate skills to potential employers, build identity and reputation within learning communities, and create pathways for continued learning and leadership roles.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • To have value beyond a teacher's blog or Twitter feed, digital badges need to have both rigor and market worth.
  • A system filled with "junk" badges will have far less integrity than one filled with micro-credentials awarded by reputable organizations.
  • Research shows that teachers who earn a Master's degree don't necessarily see an increase in student achievement (3), and yet current salary structures and professional development models are often tied directly to those macro-credentials.
  • Building micro-credentials that have rigor and market worth could be the first step toward updating our current paradigm of how we credential learning. If we truly want to build school-wide cultures that empower learners to grow as individuals, we need to provide personalized learning opportunities for all of our learners -- including our teachers.
Jill Bergeron

Design Thinking and PBL | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...-thinking-and-pbl-beth-holland

Edutopia pbl design innovation design thinking project based learning

shared by Jill Bergeron on 28 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Imagine innovation as a three-legged stool. Many schools have changed the environment leg, but not the other two legs: the behaviors and beliefs of the teachers, administrators, and students.
  • Lately, I have heard teachers and school leaders express a common frustration: "We are _______ years into a _______ initiative, and nothing seems to have changed." Despite redesigning learning spaces, adding technology, or even flipping instruction, they still struggle to innovate or positively change the classroom experience. Imagine innovation as a three-legged stool. Many schools have changed the environment leg, but not the other two legs: the behaviors and beliefs of the teachers, administrators, and students.
  • If we look at the science of improvement, systematic change occurs between the contexts of justification (what we know) and discovery (the process of innovation).
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Encouraging students to engage in inquiry, explore real-world contexts, and share their learning lies at the heart of PBL. As an instructional framework, it allows teachers to achieve these goals while still meeting curriculum requirements.
  • He used PBL to: Guide his students' problem solving Support their collaboration and critical thinking Provide voice and choice in how they demonstrated their learning Empower them to realize that their contributions to the community make a tangible difference
  • However, viewing PBL as a process rather than a product means that teachers can fit it within existing curricular objectives, as exemplified by Jodie Deinhammer.
  • According to the Stanford d-School process guide, design thinking begins with empathy: What do your students consider important? Which topics spark their curiosity? How might they want to engage with this specific content? How might they choose to demonstrate their learning?
  • In the next phase of design thinking, you define a problem. In school terms, this could be a curricular unit, a set of skills, or a broader community challenge.
  • With the problem articulated, start generating ideas. During the ideate phase, the goal is breadth because the answer may not be readily apparent. Many of these ideas then turn into prototypes, simplified versions of potential solutions.
  • This gives you the freedom to experiment without concerns about failing with students. When ready, produce the final lesson, unit, activity, or even a complete PBL experience.
Jill Bergeron

"Focus on Kids, Not Ourselves": Guiding Principle At Design 39 Campus | The Future of K... - 3 views

www.grantlichtman.com/-principle-at-design-39-campus

design thinking innovation collaboration silos

shared by Jill Bergeron on 26 Feb 16 - No Cached
stephawesomie liked it
  • Mornings are for “Integrated Learning Time”; no rigid boundaries of subject, time, or space.  The pod teachers decide when and how the students will move, and the teams focus relentlessly on how students will learn content through big, cross-disciplinary themes.  The afternoons are split between “Deep Dives”, physical activity-based “Minds in Motion”, “Exploration” opportunities for students to follow their passions,  and some dedicated time for mathematics in the upper grade levels.  Within each of these broad areas, the teachers are expected to amplify the process of inquiry and to embed the skills of design thinking.
  • How might we further dissolve rigidity by allowing students to re-arrange classroom furniture on a very frequent (more than daily) basis to meet the learning objectives of the moment? How often can we get students up to the writing walls to collaborate on work rather than taking individual notes or keying into their individual devices? How might we constantly defuse the “teacher-centrism” of the room?  If the teacher is not using a fixed projector or other device that requires a “front of the room”, why set the podium there, or stand there? How might we empower students to ask the questions that guide discussion? How might we allow students to find the best ways to interact within learning teams, rather than giving them a strict methodology to follow?  When have we given them enough instruction on how to learn, and when is it best for them to find this out for themselves and with their peers?
  • Jill Bergeron on 26 Feb 16
     
    This article showcases a school that focuses on integrated learning, interdisciplinary studies, collaboration and design thinking...all at the elementary school level.
  • smontevirgen on 27 Feb 16
     
    Love this article thinking about the UCLA school that mounts the projector to the ceiling projecting onto the floor as an alternative. Students sit around the projection instead of at desks
Jill Bergeron

Recognizing and Overcoming False Growth Mindset | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...lse-growth-mindset-carol-dweck

growth mindset mindset Edutopia dweck

shared by Jill Bergeron on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • A growth mindset is the belief that you can develop your talents and abilities through hard work, good strategies, and help from others. It stands in opposition to a fixed mindset, which is the belief that talents and abilities are unalterable traits, ones that can never be improved.
  • We typically teach students a growth mindset through online programs that demonstrate how the brain changes with learning (how the neurons grow stronger connections when students work on hard things and stick with them) and how to apply this to their schoolwork.
  • "Great effort" became the consolation prize for children who weren't learning. So the very students who most needed to learn about developing their abilities were instead receiving praise for their ineffective effort.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Teachers need to tell the truth. They can acknowledge laudable effort, but they also need to acknowledge when students are not learning effectively, and then work with them to find new learning strategies. (By the way, exhorting students to try hard is another ineffective practice that does not teach a growth mindset.)
  • Skilled educators set high standards for students but then help them understand how to embark on the path to meeting those standards. It's not a hollow promise.
  • In the safety of these classrooms, students can begin to leave behind their fixed mindset and try out the idea that they can develop their abilities. We see this happening when teachers give students: Meaningful work Honest and helpful feedback Advice on future learning strategies Opportunities to revise their work and show their learning
  • In order to work toward more of a growth mindset, we need to observe ourselves and find our triggers. Just spend several weeks noticing when you enter a more threatened, defensive state. Don't judge yourself. Don't fight it. Just observe. Then, as Susan Mackie advises, give your fixed mindset persona a name. Talk to it, calling it by name, when it shows up. Over time, try to recruit it to collaborate on your challenging goals instead of letting it undermine you with doubts and fears.
  • Jill Bergeron on 15 Jan 16
     
    This article describes what constitutes a growth mindset and what contributes to a false growth mindset. Dweck also offers advice on how to avoid the pitfalls of a false growth mindset.
Jill Bergeron

Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes | TED Talk | TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...ana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach

mistakes TED learning teaching

shared by Jill Bergeron on 04 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Jill Bergeron on 04 Oct 16
     
    "Diana Laufenberg shares three surprising things she has learned about teaching - including a key insight about learning from mistakes."
Jill Bergeron

The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views

www.marshallmemo.com/issue.php

marshall mindset curriculum planning work-life balance pd professional development ability grouping differentiation grouping math PLC

shared by Jill Bergeron on 10 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • “It’s not just effort, but strategy. Students need to know that if they’re stuck, they don’t need just effort. You don’t want them redoubling their efforts with the same ineffective strategies. You want them to know when to ask for help and when to use resources that are available.”
  • the key to schools succeeding with all students is prioritizing – isolating and focusing on “only the most vital, game-changing actions that ensure significant improvement in teaching and learning” and then sustaining a disciplined, laser-like focus for a significant amount of time.
  • Teachers should have clear, specific direction on which skills and concepts to teach – the what and when – with discretion on the how to and some room each week for teachable moments and personal passions.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Of paramount importance is ongoing checking for student understanding (minute by minute, day by day, week by week) and adjusting instruction based on assessment insights. This is especially important for project- and problem-based learning.
  • “To succeed, students simply need vastly more time to purposefully read, discuss, and write about worthy, substantive literature and nonfiction across the curriculum (as often as possible, in the interpretive and argumentative mode)
  • “this should occur in a climate that emphasizes helpfulness and growth, rather than evaluation.”
  • “Nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time,” says Dweck. “Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets.
  • When students fail, teachers and parents should say things like, “Okay, what is this teaching us? Where should we go next?”
  • With praise, focus on the process that led to success – hard work, good strategies, effective use of resources. “Be matter-of-fact,” advises Dweck, “with not too strong or too passive a reaction… Effective teachers who actually have classrooms full of children with a growth mindset are always supporting children’s learning strategies and showing how strategies created that success.”
  • U.S. elementary teachers spend an average of about 32 hours a week with their students, secondary teachers about 30 hours, out of a 38-hour contractual week. Daily planning time ranges from 12 to 80 minutes for elementary teachers, from 30 to 96 minutes at the secondary level. The paucity of contractual planning time in most schools pushes a lot of teachers’ work into late afternoons, evenings, and weekends; including that time, the typical teacher’s work week is about 52 hours.
  • Teachers need two types of planning time, Merritt believes: (a) Individual time every day to prepare materials for upcoming lessons, assess student work, and communicate with specialists and parents about their students; and (b) common planning time once or twice a week with same-grade/same-subject colleagues to plan, implement, reflect on, and modify instruction.
  • The 30-32 hours U.S. teachers spend with their students each week compares to about 20-21 hours in other countries.
  • Shorter days for students
  • No-student days embedded within the school year
  • The number of such days ranges from two to 18 per school year.
  • Increased staffing – Core subject teachers can be given more planning time within the school day if their students go out to additional physical education, art, music, science, environmental education, and other specialty subjects – and also by increasing supervised recess and using instructional assistants and parent volunteers.
  • “we should trust teachers who are asking for more time, and make planning time a high priority in budgeting decisions. Instead of implementing costly interventions that yield minimal results in schools, we should pay more attention to the repeated requests from teachers about how to support them in their daily work… They need more time to identify problems they see in their schools or classrooms and work individually and collectively on solutions.”
  • Using inquiry protocols, they asked each other What do we want students to get out of the curriculum? and How can we get them there? -   They collaboratively developed model curriculum units and adapted them as needed; -   They used a fishbowl approach to observe colleagues teaching new curriculum materials; -   They watched outside curriculum experts modeling appropriate classroom strategies. -   They looked together at student work as students grappled with the new expectations and thought about the implications for unit and lesson planning; -   They jointly figured out ways to support students in material that at first seemed too hard.
  • Meaningful data – Static assessment results from benchmark assessments are not enough. To have truly high-quality discussions about their work, teachers need (a) open-ended assessment items from their ongoing instruction to identify student strategies and uncover their mathematical reasoning; (b) feedback from classroom observations; and (c) video clips of their own instruction and that of colleagues.             • Supportive tools – These include classroom observations and videos and having a facilitator with deep pedagogical content knowledge. It’s also crucial that the PLC sinks its teeth into one or two substantive and actionable math concepts or strategies.
  • • Supportive colleagues – Dissonance is not enough, say the authors. To truly improve instruction, teachers also need a collegial group that will hold their hands as they deal with their students’ struggles and criticism from observers:
  • “It is likely,” say the authors, “that repeated video recording and written feedback motivated Ms. Walker and other teachers to try out new instructional strategies and continuously  assess and refine them so that they could demonstrate improvement in subsequent observed lessons.”
  • -   Within-class grouping (teachers differentiating instruction among several small groups) had moderately positive effects.
  • -   Cross-grade grouping (students from different grade levels brought together to learn a particular subject or unit – e.g., the Joplin Plan for reading) had small-to-moderate benefits.
  • -   These two forms of grouping benefited students with high, medium, and low achievement.
  • -   Special grouping for gifted students (pullout or honors programs) was very helpful for those students.
  • -   Acceleration (students skipping a grade or taking courses at a younger age than their peers) was the most beneficial of all.
  • Jill Bergeron on 10 Jan 17
     
    "1. Mike Schmoker on three focus areas 2. Carol Dweck on fine-tuning the growth mindset 3. Maximizing high-quality teacher planning time 4. Effective and ineffective teacher teamwork in the Common Core 5. What gets professional learning communities working well? 6. Research findings on ability grouping and acceleration"
Jill Bergeron

Support and Resources for Educators - 0 views

ldaamerica.org/educators

LD learning differences learning disorders differentiation

shared by Jill Bergeron on 14 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Jill Bergeron on 14 Dec 16
     
    The Learning Disorders Association provides curated lists of resources for students with a variety of learning differences.
Jill Bergeron

Questions + Answers | LD OnLine - 1 views

www.ldonline.org/questions

LD learning differences learning disabilities differentiation

shared by Jill Bergeron on 14 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Jill Bergeron on 14 Dec 16
     
    This question and answers section of LD Online (Learning Disabilities) offers numerous topics for greater in depth exploration of ADHD and other common learning disabilities.
Jill Bergeron

The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views

www.marshallmemo.com/issue.php

coaching instructional coaching writing comments grading pre-assessments

shared by Jill Bergeron on 26 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • “Improvement [in writing] starts with volume. Volume suffers if I have to grade everything. Grading doesn’t make kids better. Volume, choice, and conferring makes kids better.”
  • “Give students daily opportunities to leave tracks of their thinking, use those tracks to notice patterns, and adjust instruction on the basis of what kids know and what they need. Repeat cycle.”
  • “Pre-assessment without associated action is like eating without digestion.”
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • So far, says Sternberg, all the ways we’ve tried to measure raw intelligence haven’t worked.
  • No existing IQ or other test can separate past opportunities from test performance.
  • “If you understand the child’s knowledge and cognitive skills in a domain that is really meaningful to the child,” says Sternberg, “you will learn what the student is capable of doing in other domains, if only motivated to pursue those other domains.”
  • you cannot cleanly separate out measurement of intelligence from measurement of reading (obviously, a verbal skill). The same holds for other content domains.”
  • The coach’s role, she says, “is not to fix lessons or teachers but to support teachers’ abilities to meet students’ needs.
  • Let the teacher “drive” the process.
  • the coach’s job in goal-setting is to search for points of agreement with the teacher and to direct her in ways likely to produce positive results.”
  • “The coach also needs to respect the teacher’s autonomy by offering feedback only on agreed-upon goals,” adds Finkelstein. “As tempting as it can be for coaches to identify areas for improvement, unsolicited suggestions can arouse defensiveness.”
  • “Improvement starts with volume. Volume suffers if I have to grade everything. Grading doesn’t make kids better. Volume, choice, and conferring makes kids better.” This helped Tovani realize that she didn’t have to assess every piece of student writing, which allowed her to grade less and assess more: “I don’t have to always write the perfect comment or give a grade,” she says. “[W]hat’s most essential to improving the quality of students’ work is collecting feedback for ourselves from that work and noticing patterns in students’ skills (or lack thereof) that we can use to determine our next instructional moves.”
  • This view is critical to mitigating teacher resistance to feedback, which most teachers expect will be evaluative.” A smart strategy is to focus on what students have learned rather than the teacher’s skill executing lessons. “Collaboratively examining student performance can provide an effective third space for this kind of non-evaluative feedback,” she says.
  • “It is the coach’s responsibility to dispel any perception that her job is easier or more relaxed than the teacher’s.” This means writing lesson plans, citing standards, teaching lessons, collecting books and materials, helping with assessments, doing grading, and helping with other paperwork.
  • At the same time, the coach needs to think strategically about the teacher’s growth and development and ultimate independence.
  • “Coaches also walk the walk by using their access to authority in schools to advocate for teachers,”
  • Communicate clearly and transparently. Right from the start, coaches need to spell out key details of the partnership, including: -   The goals and time frame; -   When, why, and how the coach will observe in the classroom; -   What non-evaluative feedback will look and sound like; -   With whom the coach will (and will not) share feedback.
  • “Coaches must be particularly sensitive about writing down anything while visiting a classroom,”
  • There are plenty of reasons for resistance to being “helped” by an instructional coach, she says, often manifested in shallow acquiescence, avoidance, or overt hostility: -   Teachers believing (not without reason) that they’ve been singled out as deficient; -   Fear of being judged and exposed as ineffective with students; -   Fear that deficiencies unrelated to the presenting issue will be revealed; -   A belief that the instructional coach may report on them to the principal; -   Worries about being admonished by the principal; -   Discomfort examining their own practice; -   Anxiety about having to change.
  • Spend less time writing comments. -   Modify instruction based on what’s learned from students’ work. -   Build in time for students to revise their work based on feedback and self-assessment.
  • “Students compare my criteria of success with their performance,” she says, “and reflect on how my responses are alike or different from theirs.” If students do poorly on one of her quizzes, she’ll go over items in class, giving students a chance to add points by showing improvement.
  • share with the teacher any notes taken during observations.
  • Exit tickets – At the end of class, students jot one thing they figured out and one thing they’re wondering about. Tovani spreads these out on a table and draws conclusions about the next day’s lesson. “I don’t waste time writing comments,” she says. “I simply look for patterns, and when I’ve figured out a few, I throw the tickets away.”
  • Response journals – In individual composition notebooks, students reflect on their learning for the day. Tovani reads a third of these each day during her planning period, takes a third home, and reads the rest the next morning. “I limit my comments and challenge myself to identify patterns,” she says.
  • While commenting, she records her observations in four columns: students’ use of skills and strategies; confusing vocabulary; students’ questions related to the reading; and how skillfully students are dealing with a genre or text structure. She gives feedback or a quick correction to individual students or to the whole class.
  • “If pre-assessments simply demonstrate to students how little they know, this exercise may negatively affect their disposition toward the upcoming event,”
  • Teachers’ messaging needs to emphasize that a pre-assessment won’t count against students and the purpose is to help make lessons more effective and fun, highlight what’s going to be learned, and allow students to set goals.
  • To avoid giving pre-assessments that add little value, teachers should use them only when necessary, keep them short, using multiple-choice questions where possible, and limit questions to areas where the teacher genuinely doesn’t know how students will perform.
  • A thorough unit pre-assessment might well reveal four levels of student preparation in a single classroom: students who know the intended outcomes up front; students who have partial knowledge; students who have little or no knowledge; and students who have significant misconceptions. Trying to differentiate for all these students is a classroom management nightmare for even the most creative teacher. Guskey and McTighe suggest a compromise, with some highly engaging whole-class presentations and then significant decentralization and choice with frequent checks for understanding.
  • When possible, teachers should gather pre-assessment data with individual student dry-erase boards, clickers, or other methods that allow for rapid student input and teacher analysis and decision-making.
  • three guidelines to ensure that pre-assessments are practical, provide useful data, and enhance student learning:
  • Teachers should be clear about the purpose, both for themselves and their students. What new and helpful data will be gathered? Do students know why they are doing the pre-assessment?
  • Decide how the information will be used.
  • Possible follow-ups include reviewing essential knowledge and skills with the whole class, addressing misconceptions, providing targeted instruction, linking content to students’ interests, and differentiating for individuals or groups.
  • They’re not necessary for every new unit, say the authors – only when they can really add value and only if they’re short and can produce data that can be assessed quickly.
  • Taking three or more related courses in one career area boosted students’ chances of graduating from high school on time by 21 percent.
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 541 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page